Obesity remains a serious health problem and it is no secret that many people want to lose weight. Behavioral economists typically argue that “nudges” help individuals with various decisionmaking flaws to live longer, healthier, and better lives. In an article in the new issue of Regulation, Michael L. Marlow discusses how nudging by government differs from nudging by markets, and explains why market nudging is the more promising avenue for helping citizens to lose weight.

Two long wars, chronic deficits, the financial crisis, the costly drug war, the growth of executive power under Presidents Bush and Obama, and the revelations about NSA abuses, have given rise to a growing libertarian movement in our country – with a greater focus on individual liberty and less government power. David Boaz’s newly released The Libertarian Mind is a comprehensive guide to the history, philosophy, and growth of the libertarian movement, with incisive analyses of today’s most pressing issues and policies.

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Shortly before Christmas the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released a report detailing deportations (henceforth “removals”) conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during fiscal year 2014. Below I present the data on removals in historical context – combined with information from the Migration Policy Institute and Pew. See my previous writing on this topic here and here.

ICE deported 102,224 unauthorized immigrants from the interior of the United States in 2014, down from a peak of 188,422 in 2011. Removals from the interior are distinct from removals of recent border crossers. Removals from the interior peaked during the Obama administration and have since fallen to a level equal to that of 2007.

Source: MPI and DHS.

The number of interior removals under the last six years of the Bush administration (the first two years is unavailable so far) was about 475,000. From 2009-2014, the Obama administration has removed about 950,000 from the interior of the United States.

President Bush’s administration removed an average of about 276,000 unauthorized immigrants per year for the years available and an average of 79,000 of them annually were interior removals. President Obama’s administration has removed an average of 405,000 unauthorized immigrants a year, an average of 158,000 of them annually were interior removals. There were a large numbers of unknowns during the Bush administration that decreased as the years progressed.

Source: MPI and DHS.

The Obama administration’s decrease in the number of interior removals is not the whole story. The best way to measure the intensity of immigration enforcement is to look at the percentage of the unauthorized immigrant population removed in each year. Based on estimates of the total size of the unauthorized immigrant population, 0.89 percent of that population was removed from the interior of the United States in 2014 – down from 1.15 percent in 2013.

For every year for which data was available, the Bush administration removed an average of 0.7 percent of the interior unauthorized immigrant population. President Obama’s administration has removed an average of 1.39 percent of the interior unauthorized immigrant population every year of his presidency – about twice the rate as under the Bush administration. Even when focusing on interior removals, President Obama is still out-deporting President Bush based on the data available.

The unauthorized immigrant population increased under the Bush administration from 9.4 million in 2001 to a peak of 12.2 million in 2007 and then declined to 11.7 million in 2008. During Obama’s administration, the number of unauthorized immigrants has, so far, stayed at or below 11.5 million.

Obama’s interior removal statistics show a downward trend beginning in 2012 through to 2014. The Obama administration has also focused immigration enforcement on criminal offenders (not all unlawful immigrants are criminals) but the data is a little difficult to disentangle for 2014 so I left it out of this blog post – stay tuned for a future one on that topic.

The Obama administration has clearly not gutted interior immigration enforcement as their 2014 figures for interior removals are higher than they were for every year of the Bush administration except for 2007 and 2008.

Two years ago, there was a flurry of excitement because MarketWatch journalist Rex Nutting crunched annual budget numbers and proclaimed that Barack Obama was the most fiscally conservative president since at least 1980.

I looked at the data and found a few mistakes, such as a failure to adjust the numbers for inflation, but Nutting’s overall premise was reasonably accurate.

As you can see from the tables I prepared back in 2012, Obama was the third most frugal president based on the growth of total inflation-adjusted spending.

And he was in first place if you looked at primary spending, which is total spending after removing net interest payments (a reasonable step since presidents can’t really be blamed for interest payments on the debt accrued by their predecessors).

So does this mean Obama is a closet conservative, as my old—but misguided—buddy Bruce Bartlett asserted?

This is a difficult question to answer. As Matt Graham at the Bipartisan Policy Center has pointed out, the rate of internal removals as a percentage of all Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) removals has declined during the Obama Presidency. But this, in and of itself, doesn’t tell us much about the long run trends of internal enforcement. We need data from the past that we can compare President Obama’s immigration enforcement record to. We only have the rate of internal deportations for the last year of the Bush Administration. Cato has filed a FOIA to find out if the government kept statistics on internal versus border removals prior to 2008 but I’ve heard the data wasn’t kept.

Let’s assume that 63.6 percent of all ICE removals were internal from 2001 to 2007. I chose 63.6 percent because that was ICE’s internal removal rates in the year 2008 – the first year when that statistic is available. That means that the number of internal removals under the Bush administration was about 1.25 million. From 2009-2013, the Obama administration’s has removed just over 1 million from the interior of the United States. Of course, Bush had three more years to deport unauthorized immigrants. 660,000 people were removed from the interior of the United States during the first five years of the Bush administration.

Source: Department of Homeland Security, BPC, Author’s Calculations.

President Bush removed an average of about 250,000 unauthorized immigrants a year, an average of 160,000 of them annually were interior removals. President Obama has removed an average of 390,000 unauthorized immigrants a year, an average of 200,000 of them annually were interior removals.

Source: Department of Homeland Security, BPS, Author’s Calculations.

As I’ve written before, the best way to measure the intensity of immigration enforcement is to look at the percentage of the unauthorized immigrant population deported in each year.

I focus on the internal removal figures as a percentage of the estimated unauthorized immigrant population and assume that the internal removal rate of 63.6 percent prevailed throughout the Bush administration. If that interior enforcement rate was steady, then the Bush administration deported an average of 1.43 percent of the interior unauthorized immigrant population every year of his presidency. President Obama’s administration has deported an average of 1.75 percent of the interior unauthorized immigrant population every year of his presidency. Even when focusing on interior removals, President Obama is still out-deporting President Bush - so far.

The Obama interior removal statistics certainly show a downward trend – especially in 2012 and 2013. However, the Obama administration has not gutted or radically reduced internal immigration enforcement no matter how you dice the numbers.

I almost feel sorry for the Obama administration’s spin doctors. Every month, they probably wait for the unemployment numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics with the same level of excitement that people on death row wait for their execution date.

As the chart below indicates, the White House promised that the unemployment rate today would be almost 5 percent if we enacted the so-called stimulus back in 2009. Instead, the new numbers show that the jobless rate is 7.9 percent, almost 3.0 percentage points higher.

I enjoy using this chart to indict Obamanomics, in part because it’s a two-fer. I get to criticize the administration’s economic record, and I simultaneously get to take a jab at Keynesian spending schemes.

What’s not to love?

That being said, I don’t think the above chart is completely persuasive. The White House argues, with some justification, that these data simply show that they underestimated the initial severity of the recession. There’s some truth to that, and I’ll be the first to admit that it wouldn’t be fair to blame Obama for a bleak trendline that existed when he took office (but I will blame him for continuing George W. Bush’s policies of excessive spending and costly intervention).

That’s why I think the data from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve are more damning. They show all the recessions and recoveries in the post-World War II era, which presumably provides a more neutral benchmark with which to judge the Obama record.

When the Basel I accords, mandating higher capital-asset ratios for banks, were introduced in 1988, they were embraced by the administration of President George H.W. Bush. With higher capital-asset ratios came a sharp slowdown in the money supply growth rate and—unfortunately for President George H. W. Bush and his re-election campaign—a mild recession from July 1990 through March 1991.

Now, we have Basel III and its higher capital-asset ratio requirements being imposed on banks in the middle of a weak, drawn-out economic recovery. This is one of the major reasons why the recovery is so anemic.

How could this be? Well, banks produce bank money, which accounts for roughly 85% of the total U.S. money supply (M4). Mandated increases in bank capital requirements result in contractions in bank money, and thus in the total money supply.

Here’s how it works:

While the higher capital-asset ratios that are required by Basel III are intended to strengthen banks (and economies), these higher capital requirements destroy money. Under the Basel III regime, banks will have to increase their capital-asset ratios. They can do this by either boosting capital or shrinking assets. If banks shrink their assets, their deposit liabilities will decline. In consequence, money balances will be destroyed.

So, paradoxically, the drive to deleverage banks and shrink their balance sheets, in the name of making banks safer, destroys money balances. This, in turn, dents company liquidity and asset prices. It also reduces spending relative to where it would have been without higher capital-asset ratios.

The other way to increase a bank’s capital-asset ratio is by raising new capital. This, too, destroys money. When an investor purchases newly-issued bank equity, the investor exchanges funds from a bank account for new shares. This reduces deposit liabilities in the banking system and wipes out money.

But this progress didn’t last long. Thanks to George Bush’s reckless spending policies, the federal budget grew about twice as fast as the economy, jumping by nearly 90 percent in just eight years This pushed federal spending up to about 25 percent of GDP.

This new video from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation uses examples of waste, fraud, and abuse to highlight President Obama’s failed fiscal policy.

Good stuff, though the video actually understates the indictment against Obama. There is no mention, for instance, about all the new spending for Obamacare that will begin to take effect over the next few years.

But not everything can be covered in a 5-minute video. And I suspect the video is more effective because it closes instead with some discussion of the corrupt insider dealing of Obama’s so-called green energy programs.

I sliced the historical data from the Office of Management and Budget a couple of ways, showing that overall spending has grown at a relatively slow rate during the Obama years. Adjusted for inflation, both total spending and primary spending (total spending minus interest payments) have been restrained.

So does this make Obama a fiscal conservative?

And how can these numbers make sense when the President saddled the nation with the faux stimulus and ObamaCare?

Good questions. It turns out that Obama’s supposed frugality is largely the result of how TARP is measured in the federal budget. To put it simply, TARP pushed spending up in Bush’s final fiscal year (FY2009, which began October 1, 2008) and then repayments from the banks (which count as “negative spending”) artificially reduced spending in subsequent years.

The combination of those two factors made a big difference in the numbers. Here’s another table from my prior post, looking at how the presidents rank when you subtract both defense and the fiscal impact of deposit insurance and TARP.

All of a sudden, Obama drops down to the second-to-last position, sandwiched between two of the worst presidents in American history. Not exactly a ringing endorsement.

But this ranking is incomplete. At that point, I was trying to gauge Obama’s record on domestic spending, and the numbers certainly provide some evidence that he is a stereotypical big-spending liberal.

But the main debate is about which president was the biggest overall spender. So I’ve run through the numbers again, and here’s a new table looking at the rankings based on average annual changes in inflation-adjusted primary spending, minus the distorting impact of deposit insurance and TARP.

Obama is still in the second-to-last position, but spending is increasing by “only” 5.5 percent per year rather than 7.0 percent annually. This is obviously because defense spending is not growing as fast as domestic spending.

Reagan remains in first place, though his score drops now that his defense buildup is part of the calculations. Clinton, conversely, stays in second place but his score jumps because he benefited from the peace dividend after Reagan’s policies led to the collapse of the Soviet Empire.

Let’s now look at these numbers from a policy perspective. Rahn Curve research shows that government is far too big today, so the goal of fiscal policy should be to restrain the burden of government spending relative to economic output.